Friday, March 25, 2011

I don't understand plumbing. Never have and I don't suppose I ever will. Once, many years ago while I was working for a living, I was employed as a building labourer. One day I was working on some alterations to a bathroom and had been told to take a shower unit off the wall. First thing I thought to do was check that the shower was disconected from the mains (it was an electric shower) I also made sure it was disconnected from the water mains. Electrics first; - and this is where I went wrong - I went to the main fuseboard, made sure the fuse marked 'SHOWER' was pulled (and then put in my pocket so it couldn't be accidentally put back in again by someone else as soon as I left). I made sure that the fuse in my pocket was in fact the right fuse and not the fuse for something else like the upstairs lights that had been mislabelled. I went back to the bathroom and tried to switch the shower on. No light. And no water comes out of the shower when I turn it on. No power. Good. Next I checked that the water to the bathroom was off by turning on the taps in the sink next to the shower. A dry gurgle and nothing. Sure now that it was safe to proceed, I unscrewed the shower's casing, disconnected the wiring (making the ends secure and safe in an insulated lump of chockblock). I unscrewed the couple of chunky screws holding the unit on the wall; now all I had to do was disconnect the water. I found the inlet pipe (not a difficult task as it was the only thing attaching the shower unit to the house) and selected a suitable spanner. Tea break soon. Great. Two twists of the spanner later and I felt a lurch. Suddenly I had a shower unit in my hands and a solid jet of water shooting horizontally past my face out of the pipe I had just been working; a solid jet of water that reached across the room, bounced back from the opposite wall, and hit me squarely between the shoulder blades.

Within seconds I was soaked through and my clothing weighed twice as much as I did. I was also screaming for help. I had dropped the shower unit (on my toe) and was leaning forward, both hands pressed against the pipe end. The water pressure was high so I didn't staunch all the flow but I did cut it down a little. The water that was coming out was now shooting up the inside of my sleeves and down out of my trouser legs, but as I couldn't get any wetter than I already was it didn't make much difference to me. My boss arrived. He took one look through the door at this screaming animated fountain, said "Fuck!" very loudly, and dived through the hatch in the floor that led to the underfloor crawl space. Within seconds he located the stopcock he had missed the last time he'd been down there and he cut the supply.

(This did make me wonder how he had managed to miss the bugger last time, but what the hell, everyone makes mistakes.)

What I should have done before anything else, was tried the shower. It was the type of electric shower that had to be connected to the mains and switched on before even cold water would come out. Switch off the power and nothing comes through even though there is a terrific water pressure behind it. Why it was on a different supply from the rest of the bathroom is (to me at least) a complete mystery.

Why am I bothering telling you all this? No idea really. The house we were working on was a reletively new build - less than ten years old at the time and all the plumbing was put in at the same time. My house is 130 years old and built before the village had any mains water supply. I don't know when it was first connected but the plumbing in it has been added piecemeal over the years by many people - me included. At the moment our upstairs toilet cistern won't stop filling up. You flush, it refills and, nine times out of ten, doesn't stop filling. This causes the excess water to go out the overflow with annoying gurgling noises. Nine times out of ten that it does this you have to wait for precisely the right moment and run the tap in the sink for 15 seconds then turn it off quickly - at which point the cistern makes a strange Grrrrrrrnk! noise and stops filling up. (The tenth time it doesn't and you have to flush it again or just put up with the gurgling all night.)

The really baffling part is why running the hot water in the kitchen downstairs should make the upstairs toilet suddenly start to fill up again and why turning on the kitchen sink cold water tap makes it stop.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I'm developing a game to play while I do the housework. I have BBC Radio 4 on during the day1, and Radio 4 spends most of its time mildly entertaining me, or deeply irritating me depending on its mood. I find it very hard to turn off, even on those days when it's snarky and determined to get under my skin by being even more London-centric, fatuous, and patronising than usual.

I need a trigger to get me to turn it off when it's like that. Hence Radio 4 Bingo. I'm making a list of key annoying words and phrases that, when I hear someone using them on air, I can cross off a bingocard like grid. Once I've crossed off enough to shout "Bingo!", or "House!", (or whatever it is the mad old grannies who play bingo shout) I can turn off the radio.

So far the list is:

'Absolutely!' - when used in answer to a question - where 'yes' would have been a really good answer.

'Devastated' - double points if the so-called devastation is caused by something so trivial that you roll your eyebrows in disgust2. Earthquakes are devastating. Having it rain on your day out in Disneyland Paris is just a bit of a piss off.

'Issues' (as a noun).

Any new (to you) verbing3 of a noun. Today I heard an avant-guarde art gallery curator saying, of a group of artists, "What we do here is forefront them."

Any new (to you) piece of mangled English that makes you wish you knew more about grammar and syntax so could work out exactly what did just happened in your ears, e.g. today I heard "It depends how limitating it is..."

Bad creative writing in the weather forecast; "Over the night-time period" being a favourite at the moment.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

I had a rush of deja-vu to the head yesterday. This computer doesn't have a floppy drive (for younger readers, a floppy drive is what you put floppy discs into - and if you don't know what they are then the rest of this post is going to make very little sense. So, to keep the yoofs entertained while us oldies get on with things, here's a really fuck ugly painting of teen pop idol Michael Jackson (I think) that I just found at fineartamerica.com - $300 Dollars and it's yours to burn in the privacy of your own bonfire.

Where was I? [Gods! that is ugly.] Anyway, this computer doesn't have a floppy drive and on Saturday, at a car boot sale, between buying DVDs of films I'll never get round to watching because they are all too good and serious Art Films - not the explosion ridden crap with sweaty large-breasted women in that I usually watch - I bought a portable 3½" drive that plugs into a USB hole. It was a quid. The man who sold it me asked why I wanted it - the tenor of his voice suggesting he thought this was a totally obsolete piece of shit and that I was some kind of weirdo. I told him for the same reason I still had a Betamax player - you never know; one day it might come in really useful. Thus, I suspect, confirming his suspicions.

Saturday evening I plugged it in and lo and behold! it worked! Fine, brilliant, great and dandy! Oooh! I've got an A: drive again! Long time since I've seen one of them. I grab a few discs off the top of the tottering pile 3½" floppies in the office and spend a happy half hour finding they are full of stuff that I can't work out why I kept. After a while I got bored with trying to fathom why I thought I needed to keep copies of every autoexec.bat I had ever modified, put the discs back on the pile, and went on to play with other simpler pleasures, like looking up the stories behind favourite crappy movies on the IMDb.

And thence to bed.

Sunday morning, I turn on the computer, go off and make a cup of coffee while it fires up, come back coffee in hand to find the screen suspiciously black with some sort of message in white lettering... oh oh! This is usually not good news.

'Non system disc or disc error. Replace disk and strike any key to continue.'

Panic. Oh gods! The machine just died! What the hell is a 'Non system disc or disc error...'? It took a few moments but the penny finally dropped. I'd left a disc in the floppy drive. I ejected the disc and hit the any key. A wave of pleasurable nostalgia washed over me. I used to do that all the time. Panic I mean. Every time.

So that was it. Another exciting day at JunkMonkey mansions. I'm off to bed now to listen to a recording of a 56K modem on my battery powered early 80s Phillips Skymaster 3 personal cassette player:

Friday, March 11, 2011

All parents have nightmares and fears for and about their kids. Sometimes the fears are about what they will do, sometimes they are about what could happen to them. I won't list them. If you're a parent you'll know what they are; if you're not you won't really understand. (I didn't before I became a father and spent the first couple of years after my first daughter was born in a semi-permanent state of terror.)

Monday, March 07, 2011

Oh I'm in trash movie heaven. A couple of weeks ago I found a pile of big box VHS tapes in a local charity shop and have been diligently working my way through them. Last night's offering was Demonwarp (1988) - and, for the life of me, I can't work out why this has never had a DVD release. I mean everyone wants to see a Bigfoot movie with zombies, naked women, aliens, and ritual sacrifice don't they? especially one starring George Kennedy (who I am happy to discover is still alive and still working at 85). Frankly I am baffled at this film's obscurity. I have been giggling all day at it's dreadfulness. Someone needs to let the world rediscover this masterpiece of shit.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Sorry to say I watched a lot of films last month:

The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986) - a real odd one. Shot in 1976 but not 'ready for release' (whatever that means*) for another 10 years, the film takes place during the course of one day in the life of Faustus Bidgood, with a history of mental health problems and a Billy Liar like imagination, he works as a minor bureaucrat in the Newfoundland Department of Education. Lots of things are happening on this day. The final preparations for the annual charity concert in aid of crippled children are being made. The premier of Newfoundland has gone missing (again) leaving behind him cryptic clues - TV viewers are asked to help in the manhunt and could win a waffle iron if they come up with the solution as to his whereabouts. There is a child serial killer on the loose and the local TV's top children's entertainer, who dresses as a giant chicken, has resigned his job and gone on a three bottle bender while still in costume. One of Faustus' co-workers is pregnant but the father of the child is in doubt and Faustus' boss has a messianic dream of the future of education based on a vision he had when he saw his friend killed by a plummeting bag of frozen soup.

Faustus, accompanied by his childhood imaginary friend, tries to hide from all this chaos by living in an alternate fantasy reality where they staged a coup, declared Newfoundland to be an independent state, and he became president promising to resign after one year but, as president, he has a decision to make and keeps having a recurring dream that he is in fact a lowly filing clerk. There are flashbacks from at least two different characters. The fantasy (or are they?) sequences are shot in grainy black and white, there is a film within a film which represents some of Faustus' memories as a documentary and then a film within that film which purports to be the first, never to be released, Newfoundland feature film ever shot. It sounds like an unholy mess and it almost is but, amazingly, all these strands (maybe with the exception of the film within the film within the film) neatly tie up at the end. I liked it.

*Find out what 'that' means in an article from Cinema Canada - November 1986 here:

Star Trek (2009) - Meh.

The Jungle Book (1967) - Another Disney Friday night with the kids movie. Another very thin adaptation of a much loved book of my childhood. I do remember seeing this many many years ago in the cinema (I'm old enough to remember the days before the existence of museum pieces like VHS, Betamax, or even Laserdiscs) and hadn't seen it since. I was surprised at the amount of reused footage there was in it. Ka suffering the same fall from the same tree twice for example, and, as Daughter Number One pointed out, Bagheera climbs along the same tree branch several times - but then she has seen it four times.

Fugitive Alien (1987) - My first incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderments of the year. And first decent sighting of a SpaceBimbo this year too.

Space Barbie

Fugitive Alien tells the story of Ken, a 'Space Wolf', a killer elite space pirate, who has a crisis of conscience when out raiding one day and instead of gunning down a little boy (who also happens to be called Ken), he accidentally kills his best friend and fellow space pirate. Now an outcast and a traitor, he is mercilessly and relentlessly hunted for a few minutes until he escapes and joins the Earth Space fleet. After a lot of bewildering hanging about waiting for the story to really start his ship is sent on a mission to help another planet (populated by Japanese extras wearing Arab headresses) who are threatened by an enemy with a weapon so powerful it could destroy their 'whole constellation' (sic and wtf?). The second half of the film consists of Ken breaking out of jail on the Planet of the Japanese Arabs and springing one of the enemy soldiers too. Just as they are about to blast off for what our occasional narrator has called 'Their most exciting mission yet' the words 'To be continued' appear on screen and the thing just stops. Arse! What I have just spent an hour and a half watching turns out to be half an incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderment. The sequel, Star Force: Fugitive Alien II, was, according to the IMDb, released in 1986 - the year before the original. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true.

A standard tool used by American producers dubbing foreign SF films into English is to include quick, cheap to make, insert shots of hands flipping switches, and interesting dials with obvious English wording on them. I guess they would often be replacing shots of dials and switches with Cyrillic or Japanese writing next to them but sometimes I think they were just used to cover what would have otherwise been clumsy edits. The American producers weren't too bothered about where these shots came from - I remember one film where the inserts were probably shot in the dubbing studio as they recorded the new soundtrack; all the switches and dials in the spaceship were marked with things like 'Peak Wow' and 'decibels'. These shots were usually only a couple of seconds long, if that, but wherever the new inserts came from, the producers usually employed someone who could spell. Not here:

and how this briefly flashed up computer screenful of delivery details from a Utah metal products company to 25 East Union Avenue, North Salt Lake helped to identify the fleet of hostiles just outside the good guys' spaceship window is a total mystery.

Metropolis (1927) - I finally get to see what may well be the most complete, restored version of one of my long time favourite films (it is where my usual avatar comes from) - and I fall asleep.

Marooned (1969) - Three astronauts are trapped in their Apollo capsule and NASA (or 'the NASA' as one character pedantically refers to it here) attempts to rescue them before their oxygen runs out in 42 hours. This is a long film (134 minutes) and sometimes it felt like the 42 hours was playing out in real time with most of the screen time taken up with people reading screeds of numbers at each other. For once though the techno-babble was convincingly real and occasionally the film works, it does build up tension and the brief moments when emotions break through all the cold equations are more powerful because of it; Gene Hackman is particularly good as one of the doomed crew. I was less convinced by the ending which had a Russian spaceship turn up out of nowhere and one of the astronauts doing a Captain Oates but taking a third of their dwindling supply of oxygen with them. Not sure I followed the logic of that. I could have done with a bit more exposition in places.

Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989) - Alex Proyas' first feature. An odd slow very low budget three hander. In a post apocalyptic future (fingerless gloves? check!) a brother and a sister live in a shack in the middle of a desert. He's in a wheelchair and dreams of flying, she's a religious bampot. One day a stranger arrives. The brother and the stranger build a flying machine and the stranger flies away. Some terrific visuals - even on the panned and scanned downloaded version I saw - more than made up for deficiencies in story and acting. Proyas' next film was The Crow.

MirrorMask (2005) - another début feature with stunning visuals. I loved it so did the kids. One of those films where all CGI stuff serves the story (or possibly was the story) rather than being added for sheer gosh-wowery.

Murder Party (2007) - I'm not a great modern horror fan so why I was watching a movie with someone holding two chainsaws on the front cover I'm not quite sure. Murder Party is a low/no budget horror/comedy that is almost funny in places. The plot is simple: a traffic warden finds an invitation to a Hallowe'en 'Murder Party' and decides to go. As soon as he arrives he is pounced upon by all the other guests who turn out to be an art collective in need of a victim for an artwork. It's a neat reversal of the usual low/no budget horror formula (take a bunch of teenagers to a deserted place and kill them off one by one). Here we have one victim and lots of killers. Things start to go wrong for our hero's captors when one of them has an allergic reaction to the non-organic raisins in his pumpkin cake and dies. Over the course of the evening the other 'artists', and several bystanders get themselves bumped off, in a variety of gory ways leaving our hero to go home. It almost works.

World Without End (1956) - another rewatch of an old favourite. Man's first manned mission to Mars (as always) goes horribly wrong and our gallant crew are hurled through time to a post-apoc world (this was the fifties so, damn!, no fingerless gloves) where brutish cave men rule the upper world and a dwindling scientific elite live below ground. The men of the future wear shiny futuristic caps and the women wear satin dresses with conical tits and hemlines that stop just below their bums. Our hero interlopers, with the aid of their standard issue handguns (so useful in a spaceship), and a home-made bazooka, fight off giant spiders, one-eyed mutant cavemen, and skulduggerous locals to save all the non-mutant cave men and get laid by the satin conical tit girls (though, this being the fifties, this last bit is only implied). If it wasn't so stodgily presented - for a lot of the time people stand in rows and take turns to tell each other stuff - this would be a real cracker.

Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds (1990) - every now and then I like to torture myself with a Star Trek movie. I've no idea why; I know they're tedious predictable shit even before I open the box, and, unlike most bad movies which are all unpredictably bad in their own special ways, Star Trek movies are all bad in the same ways. All so formulaic, self-referential and uninvolving that it's like watching the furniture being rearranged in someone else's house. Every now and then your hosts will stop and ask, "What do you think?" and you just have to be honest and say you can't tell the difference from the last time they asked you - though you suspect they might have swapped the sofas around.

The Enterprise

Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds was even more shittierly predictable and tedious than usual because it turned out to be a 'made for TV movie' cobbled together out of two regular episodes. (That'll teach me to read the small print a little more closely in future.) In this one the Enterprise meets the Borg again and Jean Luc P is captured and Borgified and everyone gets to recalibrate everything from the warp containment core to the kitchen toaster, and Jonathan Frakes (Ryker) gets more slow dolly shots moving in on him looking stern and decisive than any man in the history of episodic TV. And as most of these shots were done from a low angle to make him look heroic, we spent an awful lot of the 'movie's' running time staring up his nostrils. At least it made a change from watching him looking smug which is Frakes' other stock in trade pose.

At one point Patrick Stewart made a weird noise just before he spoke a line which had all the hallmarks of a bit of real acting escaping onto the screen. It was very lonely.

Lifeforce (1985) - The first manned mission to Haley's comet finds an derelict space ship. Now anyone who has ever seen ANY movies knows that entering derelict spaceships is just asking for trouble. Unfortunately our valiant crew have spent so long training to be astronauts they never watched anything other than training videos and happily go exploring. Inside they encounter a bunch of dead aliens and three perfectly preserved nude humans in suspended animation. The female of the three probably has the most beautiful tits seen on any screen during the eighties. Hypnotised by naked knockers (as most men are) the crew drag the bodies on board and head back for Earth and the plot goes into out of control free-fall with the movie ending up with rampaging alien vampire zombies destroying London, (I think they were covering all the bases when they pitched this one:

This film has a real reputation for being awful and I was surprised to find the the opening sequences weren't that bad, but it didn't take long to descend into totally confused garbage. Towards the end I gave up trying to follow what was going on - though actors kept telling me at great length - and just felt sorry for Peter Firth (who probably thought this was going to be his big Hollywood break)as he wandered about in a polo-neck jumper trying to be the hero but being confounded at every turn by the incoherent script.

The first feature film to use Brent Cross Shopping Centre as a location and the second film I've watched in a row to feature Patrick Stewart being subsumed by an alien lifeform. He explodes in this one.

The Girl Cut in Two (La fille coupée en deux 2007) - by total coincidence Mathilda May, the naked hypno-boob girl of last night's film, was the first person on screen in The Girl Cut in Two. Inspired by the murder of Stanford White in 1906 the film tells the story of a TV weather girl torn between two lovers. A rich successful older novelist and a wealthy, but unbalanced playboy. The film asks us to believe that both men already detest each other - for reasons that are never really specified - and both of them instantly fall in love with the same girl within one day. She falls in love with one, marries the other - lots of post coital conversations, lots of people sitting round eating expensive meals and a hurried, patched together, scrappy ending that looks like it had been nailed into the script to stop the film going on for another couple of hours. I didn't believe a single frame of the whole damn thing.

Dream Warrior (2003) - a cinematic version of one of those bad self published novels which starts with enough backstory flashback voice-over intro to make you think you are watching a sequel (it isn't) and then just wanders around aimlessly wasting so much time you wonder why they didn't just include all that backstory in the main narrative and cut out all the waffle. A genuinely incompetent mess with a director who does amazingly inept things like using a point of view shot [handheld camera keeks round a pillar at two guards], then showing a wide of the actor whose point of view we are supposed to have experienced getting into position to see what we have just seen him see [sneak sneak up to the pillar then keek around it], then show us again what we have seen he has just seen now that he is finally in a position to see it. THEN - having established that handheld camera keeking round a pillar is a point of view shot - shows us the hero sneaking around in a series of handheld keeking round pillar shots without once hinting that there is anyone else around to be having these point of views of the hero. Garbage direction. Other highlights included Isaac Hayes being mystical in a purple burnoose:

Hayes:

Sometimes dreams are the onlything worth having!

Hero:

What are you talking about*?

And, just to keep with self-published vibe, at least one typo in the credits; apparently there was someone responsible for 'UK Catsing'.

I really hope I don't see anything quite so dreadful as this for the rest of the year.

* Edit: I just realised this is even funnier if you do it in Cartman's voice.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) - Okay, I was wrong. For years I've had this down in my head as one of those annoyingly overly cutesy films I never wanted to see again. Watching it tonight with the kids I was pleasantly surprised at how funny it was - once I had got over the semi-Americanisation. (Still hate the fucking songs though.) The kids were enraptured by it. Afterwards number one daughter wanted to find the book to see how Veruca Salt met her fate in the original because it was different here to the Tim Burton version; geese instead of squirrels. (It was squirrels in the book.) She also thought the TV room sequence was better here, though she didn't explain why.

Timecode (2000) - another coincidence-driven rewatch. While sorting through some boxes of VHS tapes, consigning the ones I now have on DVD to the charity shop pile, I found a tape with a couple of editions of Moving Pictures which was, by far, the BBC's best ever TV program about films and film making. I watched a chunk, including the Mike Figgis interview mentioned on the Wikipedia page I just linked to, then I started on the next box. First tape that my hand touched? Mike Figgis' Timecode. So I had to watch it.

I remember being bowled over by it but this time I got really frustrated. Since first watching it I had read an interview with Figgis in which he talked about this film. Timecode was shot simultaneously on four cameras, the whole film consists of one continuous take from each of the cameras presented on a split screen like this...

...in which you have Salma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, Stellan Skarsgård, Saffron Burrows all on screen, all acting at the same time in different locations. As the film progresses characters meet each other, cross from one strand of the story to another and from one corner of the screen to another - sometimes appearing in two or more quarters simultaneously from different angles. It is, as you may imagine very complex, and at times difficult to follow. In the interview Figgis said that he nudged the audience into watching particular parts of the screen with the sound. He mixed up the sound from the quarter/s he wanted the audience to concentrate on and faded out that from where he didn't. Simple and obvious enough, but I didn't know that the first time I saw it. This time, with that knowledge in my head, I was constantly fighting being pushed from one corner of the screen to another and desperately trying to make out conversations that were almost inaudible. I may investigate any available DVDs to see if there is one with an option to isolate the soundtracks - or even mix your own on the fly; that would be fun.

Ripley's Game (2002) - I never really understood the attraction of the Ripley character. I have tried to read a couple of the books and didn't get very far with either. Anthony Minghella's 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley Amazingly was, I thought, an interesting enough film but even though it charted the 'creation' of Ripley I still didn't understand him. As soon as John Malkovich appeared on screen in Ripley's Game I got it. Amazingly this went straight to DVD/Video in the States.

Jack the Ripper (1976) - very odd little Swiss/German take on the Jack the Ripper story which, apart from a couple of library establishing shots (one anachronistically putting the wrong queen on the throne), was shot entirely in Germany and looks it. Everything was just wrong. The architecture in particular and the furniture It all looked very un English. I suppose Germans get the same feeling of wrongness about Epping Forest standing in for Frankenstein country in all those Hammer films. Klaus Kinski did his usual going bonkers stuff - which is always fun - as the mad doctor / Jack the Ripper and got caught in the end - which added to the wrongness levels. Another Jess Franco film under my belt. Only another 148 or so to go.

Planet of the Apes (1967) - the superior original. I had forgotten how fantastic the score was. And so little of it too, very spare; unlike most Hollywood soundtracks these days. Jerry Goldsmith knew when to shut up and let the pictures do the work.

Ritana (aka Returner 2002) - Japan. A lone vigilante in the standard-issue, post Matrix, full-length leather coat shoots endless supplies of Ninja Yakuza, and helps a time-travelling cute girl rescue an alien (thus saving the world from the total pasting, end of human life, alien invasion which the girl has come back in time to prevent). Lots of explosions, lots of dodging slow-mo bullets while leaping 20 feet in the air shooting two hand guns in opposite directions mid somersault, lots of running around walkways and ducking behind pipes in an empty industrial site, not a lot of plot. Certainly nothing that hasn't been done a million times before in short stories, movies, TV shows, and comic books. Anime made flesh.

Survival Zone (1983) - Raking through the back room of one of the local charity shops today (I'm such a regular I get privileges) I hit bigbox VHS paydirt. A whole pile of cruddy films in crappy 1980s bigbox cases. First into the player tonight was this dreadful, post-apocalyptic piece of poo. After a voice-over telling us that the Neutron bomb war of 1987 has wiped out nearly all animal life on Earth, we find ourselves in South Africa. We meet a bunch of bestial, leather clad bikers who watch two of their number fight and then appear to eat the looser... we meet three nuns looking after a couple of orphans in a deserted mission... we meet handsome hunk who has just buried his mother and sets off in his Land Rover to see if there is anyone else alive... we meet a happy nuclear family living on a farm. That's about all you need to know really, it's standard western plot number 37b. Indians on the warpath, lone stranger, happy sheep farmers wanting no trouble. Exactly the same. Except with nun-eating involved."

"For those who are about to eat usmake us truly grateful, amen."

So, still peckish after the nuns, the bikers attack the farm. The hunk arrives and we find he is called Adam Strong (no kidding) and the farm is called 'Eden farm' (could this be symbolic? or just bollocks?), farmer and family kill all the indians - sorry evil, nun-chomping bikers. Adam kills the head biker by whacking his head off with a spade. The End. Incidentally the head biker is the only one of the horde to speak. At one point while he is haranguing his troops and dumping backstory (they had all escaped from jail - presumably jails are neutron bombproof in South Africa) he actually says: "I warned you not to drink that contaminated water, now you are all mute!" A brilliant line which saved the writers from having to write any bestial dialogue for the cannibal bikers ("Pass the ketchup please."?) and the producers from having to pay actors to deliver them. This might all sound vaguely entertaining but it's so laboriously overwritten (apart from the bikers); everyone who does speak gets to deliver screeds of repetitive, aimless dialogue that does nothing to advance the plot and then goes round the block and does it all again just in case we missed any of it. There are whole scenes of endless pointlessness that are just baffling in their utter pointlessnessnocity. In an early one we watch Adam playing solo pool in an abandoned pub for a while till he gets bored and wanders upstairs into a room, he looks about a bit, turns on the shower - aha! water! - he decides to stay SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! and then he's asleep in bed. Something creaks. Something moves! A mirror cracks. He leaps out of bed. Suddenly there is full-on poltergeist activity going on all around him! He runs out of the hotel... meanwhile somewhere else...

What had the sudden onset of poltergeist activity got to do with anything else in the movie? Sod all.

There's a lot of SUDDEN CUTTING AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! in this movie - usually accompanied by loud music to make it really obvious. (I think the sound editor hated the director's guts. "Look!" he seems to say, "The bastard fucked up again and had to SUDDENLY CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP!") My favourite one came when we watch our hero setting a trap that involved some of the heavily foreshadowed dynamite he just happens to have around the farm. It's dark, he's in the cellar, there are nunaphagic bikers all around, he sneaks up a three step stepladder to do something trappy with some string and a nail, first step, second step SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO THE MOON IN A CLOUDY SKY! sneak back down the ladder, second step, first step... We have no idea what the hell he did up there - not that we are any wiser at the end of the movie either. Incredifuckingbly dreadful. I loved every second of it. (I forgot to check if there were any fingerless gloves in this one.)

Steel Dawn (1987) - I feel sorry for those people who don't sit through the credits at the end of movies. Apart from the odd lollipop, (like the Tibetan monk gag at the end of the end credits for The Adventures of Prescilla Queen of the Desert), you do find the most glorious names lurking in them. Steel Dawn for instance had a stunt person called Panica Protopapa (only other IMDb listing is as an actor way down near the bottom of a Marjoe Gortner movie: American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt). Not as good a name as Yolanda Squatpump but then very few names are.

Steel Dawn is the usual post-apocalyptic desert stuff (Fingerless gloves? Check!) A stranger with no name (in the cast list he is just called 'Nomad') arrives at the farm of a widow and her son just as they are having trouble with the local megalomaniac land baron who wants to run them off their land blah blah blah. Sounds like every third cowboy movie ever made after Shane except there aren't any guns and everyone is dressed in BDSM fetishist wet dream leather gear and has HUGE hair. (The villain wears something Tina Turner would have been proud of; it looks like a couple of electrified stoats glued to his head.)

Ooh! Get me, I'm so evil...

As there are no guns on show, people fight with swords. The end result is that the movie looks less like a Post Apoc Western and more like a Post-Apoc Samurai movie. In the first half hour we get to watch Patrick Swayze walk a lot. I remember thinking he wasn't as good as Toshiro Mifune. Now that man could walk.

The Eye Creatures (1965) - Another of Larry Buchanan's fantastically dreadful TV remakes. This time Invasion of the Saucer Men gets the work-over. Aliens land but are defeated by middle aged teenagers shining their car headlights on them - eye monsters explode if you shine lights on them. Superbly dreadful with all the usual Larry Buchanan hallmarks of shoddiness: there are lots of over-long shots of people walking away from the camera and into a doorway. This is a classic Buchanan shot and quite often it signals the end of a scene. The scene often actually finished quite a while beforehand but Buchanan will usually wait till everyone has left the screen before he cuts to the next one. Not very good with transitions was Mr B. Not very good at anything really.

Cargo (2010) - I was a little disappointed, after all the good reviews I have read of this, that it wasn't better. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, but I had worked out the plot about five minutes in and after that it was just watching the dominoes topple. It looked great and the lack of gunplay was welcome but it did press several of my dumb SF buttons: things like the size of the ship (the Kassandra), which was full of huge spaces all full of air at a breathable pressure.

"Captain, I think we got a stowaway.""Okay, put on your suits and vent the ship. Next problem please."

And the big engines firing all the time for four years! They only cut out about 30 seconds before they reach their destination; at which point the ship just stops (once the engines stop pushing it). At some point this ship goes FLT. It has to. Rhea, its destination, is 'four years' away from Earth. Proxima Centuri is about 4.2 light-years from us. So even if Rhea is around our nearest neighbour - and the implication is that it isn't - then the Kassandra must have gone faster than light to get there in the time. As it was constantly accelerating, when it got to Station 42 (aka Matrix in Space) it would have been doing at least lightspeed and, according to Einstein, would have accumulated enough relativistic mass to destroy the whole bloody planet as it hit.

As for the moment when our heroine jet packs straight into the open airlock of the moving spaceship at the end....

Gay Niggers from Outer Space (1992)- probably the most crappily amateur film, with some of the worst production values and dialogue I have seen for years - but so stupid it was quite endearing and genuinely funny. (Very short too.)

Flesh+Blood (1985) - Paul Verhoeven's first English language feature which owes more than a little to Kurosawa and was the third film I've watched this week that has nice Photoshop chrome gradient filled lettering on the video's cover. (Well, it's one way of choosing what to watch; next week I'll only watch videos that have skulls with glowing eyes on the front of the box.) You could tell this film had a bigger budget than the other two because the graphic designers knew how to adjust the settings and make the chrome effect a little more complex and subtle. Not sure what to make of the film. I was reminded at various times of Kurosawa's Ran, Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rutger Hauer did his usual sterling stuff and Jennifer Jason Lee was naked a lot. Either is a good enough reason to watch a film.

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Somehow it has become March without me noticing. Two days ago - a fact which caused me a little embarrassed today when I insisted the poor woman behind the counter at Blockbuster scanned the online voucher I had printed off. It would, in theory, have saved me a quid on the three DVDs I was attempting to buy from the three for a tenner bin. The voucher was valid till the end of February. She scanned it then told me it was out of date. "It's valid till the first of March," I said. "It says so there, look!""Today's the second of March.""It can't be. It was the twenty-eighth on Monday and today is only Wednesday so that means it's the thirtieth...""Of February...?"Yes the thirtieth of... oh...."

It also means I have another month's worth of crappy movies to post up here and then I'll be caught up. But I'll do it tomorrow.

To keep you entertained until then, 'The 'Planet Stories' Fiasco', a part of my book that I am not writing - which has, over the last year or so, mutated from the world's worst science fiction book into the world's worst over-annotated bibliography of a non-existent author - is currently on display in the February 2011 edition of Mythaxis.

Sometime in the next couple of years I will finish the book I am not writing. I intend to make the book I am not writing exactly 50,000 words long - I read somewhere that for a book to count as a novel it has to be at least 50,000 words. My plan is to get to 49,998 words and then write 'The End' (or 49,997 words and write 'To Be Continued'; I haven't quite made my mind up). Once I've got enough words down - I'm currently about 13,000 words short - I will start deleting the really crap bits and replacing them with slightly better bits but still keeping it at exactly fifty-K words. I have no idea why I am doing this apart from the fact that it amuses me. When I've finally finally finished pratting about with it and decided that it is finally finally as funny as I can get it, I'll publish it somewhere as a free to air PDF and start writing dirty limericks for a bit. Or dirty haikus. Or just scrawling 'Bum' on pieces of paper. Something really short anyway.

About Me

I have all these bits of paper, backs of envelopes, sides of cardboard boxes, anything flat and blank enough to scribble on, full of half-drawn, stupid cartoons and idiot poems lying around.
For years I have been saying I must get round to doing something with them. For years I have been meaning to get to grips with learning how to drive our ancient vector graphics tools.
For years my wife has been wondering how it takes me so long to see the blindingly obvious.
I can't see the blindingly obvious most of the time because I'm usually drawing fish wearing platform shoes.